


Birth of all to end

by SwordSoup



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: ....kind of, Adoptive Parent Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Adoptive Parent Technoblade (Video Blogging RPF), Alternate Universe - Angels, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Angel of Death Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Angels, Antarctic Empire Faction on SMPEarth (Video Blogging RPF), Biblical Reinterpretation, Blood God Technoblade (Video Blogging RPF), Exiled TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF), Gods, Immortal Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Immortal Technoblade (Video Blogging RPF), No Romance, Not RPF, Old Gods, Phil Watson Needs a Hug (Video Blogging RPF), Phil Watson-centric (Video Blogging RPF), Platonic Relationships, Platonic Soulmates, Sleepy Bois Inc-centric, Technoblade Needs a Hug (Video Blogging RPF), Technoblade-centric (Video Blogging RPF), The Butchers Army, Toby Smith | Tubbo Needs a Hug, TommyInnit Needs a Hug (Video Blogging RPF), Wilbur Soot Needs a Hug, almost, like theyre always gonna be together but theyre just bros
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-24 03:53:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30066243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SwordSoup/pseuds/SwordSoup
Summary: God is good.God is good. God is merciful. God has great hands bound in gold, gloves as soft as silk and hard as ivory, molding the world into a new thing, a solid thing, a beautiful thing.God is killed, brutally and swiftly, by something of the same lineage. The final Angel in the sky brings the Heavens down with it when it falls. The Blood God and the Angel of Death walk the earth, watching kingdoms fall and lands scorch themselves before their divinity could hope to touch it, before flame might even exist. They watch this broken Earth develop, lost with only a dead God to guide it.Technoblade and Philza do not claim to be as they are named. They do not deny it, either.And history always repeats. Trying to execute a God rarely works.
Relationships: Technoblade & Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF)
Comments: 35
Kudos: 157





	Birth of all to end

**Author's Note:**

> Hm. Hello. Welcome to what I like to call 13,093 words of esoteric vomit! As a former catholic and someone with debilitating derealization issues, stories about Gods and things beyond consciousness and this world are my jam, woohoo! 
> 
> This fic was written while I listened to Present tense by Radiohead on repeat. I'd encourage everyone who reads this to check it out and see what I was partially inspired by.
> 
> And with that: Enjoy.
> 
> (Hit me up on [Tumblr](https://soupsword.tumblr.com/) if you enjoy :) )

God is good.

God is good. God is merciful. God has great hands bound in gold, gloves as soft as silk and hard as ivory, molding the world into a new thing, a solid thing, a beautiful thing.

An Angel is built to fight for God. It is crafted first in his image, then warped, a swapping of parts for eyes, cylindrical, golden wreaths of light wrapped around wings black as creation. Voices as loud as music or as quiet as earth, whispering suggestions to those in God’s shadow and screaming the herald of the man himself. 

Whatever The Gods of the world, old and beautiful and kind, had intended to do upon creation of The Blood God, things had gone terribly wrong.

Such Gods have died long ago. Their angels have faded from history, replaced by sacrilegious, tempting beasts of human nature, things that have silver rings and diamond eyes. Such Gods have died, leaving behind a creation doomed. Such Gods have died at their creation’s hand, ichor its diet and humans those beneath its cloven hooves. 

But one Angel might live on.

You peer into the great, awful eyes of its crown as it lands upon the earth, shaking her body to pieces, shedding the golden tones of its maker’s brutality. Gods have died and been forgotten in days, Angels fighting a battle doomed from the moment the thing that raged against them had brayed its first, terrible, breath.

But the final Angel in a line of a million dead Gods, a million dead worlds, a million dead beasts, destined to die the moment creation became, erupts into beams of light as it lands. Its eyes and rings have rusted, wet with blood, both its own and that of its creation. It is the eldest, save for those who had fallen before it. It cries out, with a voice that shakes what little remains of the heavens, as its body warps, accommodating the world and stretching in agony.

Eyes become two. Golden rings become hands, become bones, become sternum and neck and chest and stomach and thighs and knees, planted in the dirt, where it weeps for the Gods it has lost, Gods it has betrayed.

The new world bends toward it as if looking for its master. It finds itself curling toward the earth the same, body unable to hold itself, unable to become without its leagues of fire and beautiful, shifting, angular pieces, all of everything and all of nothing at once.

“God has fallen,” whispers the man who has felled him. The God who has destroyed him. The Angel looks up, brand new eyes shedding tears, of rage and of anguish so pure it scorches the new earth all the same. The new God has a body like liquid fire, burning, washed in red and gold, and he is almost angelic. But his hands are bound in death, gloved in ichor, soft as obsidian. The new God reaches down to the Angel with a face as cruel as humanity, a new thing at that time, and smiles. “And we are left.”

\---

The new God and the final Angel walk a new land with bodies that do not fit them. There is no form to contain what they are, those memories that they retain, the souls they have felled. It is like man’s first, stumbling steps, as alone as they are. Mortal enemies, but the only two left to fight. There is no sense in battle when there is no one left to protect.

The new world is a whole one. Not yet broken with the ire of humanity. It is in a time of kindness, where fields hold flowers rather than graves, and where cities are only just beginning to become, more grass and small buildings than the mud and battle. 

The Angel hates the new world, and the only God left to oversee it. It has hated humanity since it has become, hated the new God since it opened its terrible mouth, a warped, evil thing, completed with tusks and mottled skin and the squealing of an animal that eats and takes and devours. It watches, though, as the new God walks, a shade of a battle, bloodshed gone from his eyes.

It once had many eyes to watch with. It thinks, perhaps, that its punishment, as the final Angel, is to bear the weight of blindness. It accepts this and hopes, with no sight to save it now, that the old God had perhaps planned this.

The new God directs its path, now, though. It has found itself bound to form, indebted to the very thing that has locked it away.

\---

The final Angel does not like the new God. This God does not hate him for it. There are things such as mercy and love that fly about the new world as it builds, and though the new God is not privy, he does not deny them. He watches the final Angel -- powerful enough, surely, to kill him now, should it wish, with his broken form, his bones and his flesh and all of the worst things for a God to be -- and he wonders what the old Gods had wished for when they had created the Angels.

“Protectors,” says the final Angel, with a voice that is not yet a voice, still more eyes, and sight and, endless shifting feathers than skin. Its voice is endless as the sky, commanding the oceans to turn their course, to stay their tide. “Creators. Star-hangers. World-bearers.”

“Failures,” suggests the new God. He does not turn from mercy, but he does not accept it, either.

The world is new, in infant stages, left without a God to guide it, without its Angels to steer it. There is no one to spin it around its newly formed axis, nor to pluck its flaws from its surface, blemishes, and hard, rocky coats of iron. 

The new God leaves its children to rot and to survive as they please. The final Angel sees this, but he does not speak, though its eyes flow out and search for places that are not on their path. The final Angel is not yet formed, though he walks, feathers heavy, limp, on something that has begun to look like legs. The new God walks with hooves that have grown wrong, with a spine that lifts upward in a grotesque, crooked, way. The old Gods had intended to kill him, seeing his horrible image, his broken body, his awful, awful eyes. The new God had seen this within the first moments of his life, and there he had donned a robe fashioned of blood.

\---

New things become. They are not gods, humanity, not in the way or form that those of blood are, not in the way that the final Angel had seen, once. But the new God and his Angel, bound together by death, walk the world together, and they watch as things start to begin. 

Humanity finds fire, when they bow at the new God’s feet, catching the ash that trails behind him, his awful body. 

Humanity builds storms with the gold that the final Angel still drips, hanging lightning in the sky and creating things that shake the earth, nearly as powerful as the final Angel’s cries, or the new God’s wrath.

Humanity creates color when the final Angel’s eyes start to fall away, leaving trails in the dirt. 

Humanity makes color with the ichor that trails down the new God’s sides, as he walks, the path never-ending. 

Humanity makes God without him in the skies, and the new one laughs.

\---

But humanity is doomed.

\---

Humanity is doomed, living in a world where God is dead, and the new one walks the lands, breathing dust and blood and cruelty, his final Angel with nowhere else to go but his side. They aid creation in the same way that they both had some part in destroying it. 

The first, the final, the only Angel left, is the one to see the war.

Its eyes, lessened in the ages, its rings, spread apart, torn from its form, witness the first draw of blood in a land where the only blood they have ever known is that of a dead God’s, golden and foreign and more beautiful than any remnant of creation. But it sees, and it wonders, with blind eyes, who humanity was truly born from.

“A dead God,” says the new one, with a voice heavy, laced in human concept. “I am no creator.”

But the new Angel sees, as humanity learns to bite. It sees, and it wonders.

\---

They earn stories, through ages. 

Not a single word has been spoken to humanity by either of them. They have not uttered a word to be heard since the Angel fell, since it let out a scream that broke the final white of the Heavens. Since the new God helped him up off the ground and they began to walk.

But they leave trails of eyes and endless gold and feathers like precious stardust, of all color and texture and of all things beautiful. They leave trails of dead God’s skin and ichor and weapons and blood. Old things, evil things, things better left dead, enter the world, carried down from strongholds by backs heavy with the weight of an inherited creation. 

_The Oracle,_ they call the final Angel. _The Fate. The Destiny. The Dead. The Angel_

 _The Design,_ they call the new God. _The Cruelty. The Titans. The God. The Blood._

These names are false ones, as false as God and as Angel and as final and as dead and as new. But The Blood and The Angel become. 

\---

Feathers bleed away. Ichor sloughs off. Many thousands of eyes become two.

\---

The final Angel is lighter, some days, with a body that steps quietly. The new God is heavier, some days, as if he no longer has the strength to carry the weight of something past mortality. They rest weary bodies, becoming smaller, on each other, carrying the endlessness of themselves.

\---

“You are evil,” says The Blood, red and gold and as dark as the underbelly of the moon.

“And you are good?” Asks The Angel, eyes no more than two focused on their companion. 

The Blood considers this question, with a face that has only just learned what consideration is, only just found it upon humanity he has been given. He wonders, in silence, what it means to be evil, and what it means to be good. 

“God is good,” replies The Blood. “And God is dead.”

\---

The Angel sheds great, heavy rings of gold. It ruins his eyes with the bladed ends of what have only just become hands. It rips and it tears and it demonstrates, for all of creation to see, what it means to destroy. The Angel loses all that makes it Heavenly in what has only just become night, body moving forward at The Blood’s side, unable to stop now that it has been moving for so long. It tears apart the feathers on its many thousands of wings, in one long, tearing motion.

The Blood stops it before it tears into its own chest. 

They continue.

\---

“You were once an Angel,” says a man, a human, the first to look upon those that walk the earth and find his words solid, his tongue unloosened. He is short and beautiful and dark-skinned in the way that all men have been before, with eyes that are no more than two. He catches the ash of The Blood’s ichor and drinks from his own two hands, as if the blood is his to take. 

“I was once a God,” says The Blood, as his final Angel cuts the man in a place that no longer exists. 

\---

The Blood stops walking.

The Angel does not.

\---

It doesn’t even notice that its lonely companion has disappeared, for a time so long it might’ve been moments, might’ve been years. It is blinded, its eyes gone, for many moons and many suns, now, given to greedy, ungrateful humanity. But it turns towards the stars one day to see that the new God has fallen.

It takes it time, to stop, to force the things beneath it called legs into submission, to come into stillness for the first time in eons. But it does, looking behind its back, behind the feathers that it had not been permitted to tear from its form. The new God is nothing in the distance, but his absence seems to destroy the sun, to shake the earth.

The final Angel has broken its legs for he who killed its creator. It has torn its form apart, taught the world to kill and to hate. It turns on jagged shards of white, blood all its own, inhuman and horrible, seeping down its form. But it turns, and it walks away from a destination it has begun to realize no longer exists. 

Moonlight basks its skin, white as bone. It notices, for the first time, that it has begun to grow skin, surrounding spots where muscles lie, where eyes had once screamed up from. Stars watch as someone who had once flown among them steps in tandem with the seconds, time slowing, the years beginning to register.

The Blood is motionless on a trail that no longer is carved by anything but blood. His form is still as the old God’s had been when the final Angel had seen him, falling from the sky. It thinks, throughout the years, that the hideous, awful, nature of its companion has begun to lessen.

It lies down beside the new God and it learns to rest.

\---

 _“The Blood,”_ whisper voices in the new God’s breast. He hears God, among them. He knows as soon as they begin that they are who have died beneath his hooves.

\---

 _“The Blood,”_ he whispers back, as something wet as ichor, clear as starlight, trails down his face. 

\----

The Blood stands on the fourth day, when days become days, when night becomes and sunrise begins. He stretches up from the ground in a body no longer stained in gold, bare as any God before him. He fashions clothes from a fabric of death, from the decaying, brittle bodies that have been buried in the creation below him. He scoops an inhuman hand into the fabric the dead God before him had sewn, wrapping it about his chest.

\---

The Angel awakens to something that is beginning to be called touch, brushing gently across his shoulders. The empty white of his skin has been licked by the tan of flame from his time in rest, beside the side of a new God. The Blood is wrapped in humanity, and The Angel looks down to see he has been clothed in the same. 

Black robes more nothingness than cloth. A mourner's veil, lace to shade his eyes, to cover the only ones he has left. There’s something odd to it all, and a mouth that has become more than merely human quirks up into something beginning to be called a smile.

\---

The Blood no longer leaks ichor. The humans fetch names and weapons and words.

 _The Blade,_ they call him, when he drops the final sword, stained with Angelic blood, introducing the final bit of magic from the deadened Heavens to his lands. 

\---

The Angel is lacking in eyes. The humans find words and feathers and new things to experience, new things to create, leftover from when the final Angel was the one who guided creation.

They do not change his name. There is no need. He has only ever been one thing, and that will not change.

\---

The Angel steers them into town, once the two of them have learned to walk with the ability to pause, once they’ve learned how to move in ways less beautiful and more flawed, more human, more _wrong._

It is a small, horrible thing. It is muddy dirt roads, and children, hiding behind carts, sitting in alleys, sobbing, selling themselves. It is women hidden six feet below the earth and men sent to die in fields that have not been peaceful since The Blade and The Angel became more.

“You made humanity,” says The Angel, as if it is a secret they share, that The Blade is the one to have made this all. “I wish you’d killed it.”

“I killed God,” replies the Blade, with a laugh, sharp as his name. “I wish I’d killed a little bit more.”

They burn the town into little more than ash, not raising their hands to do so. The Angel kills, and The Blade directs a symphony of death, leaving the people of the little place to scream and weep and beg. 

“It will be over soon,” promises The Angel, in a gentle, compassionate voice, as it lies another child against the dirt, bones exposed and eyes blank. 

The battle waged ends the moment The Blade steps onto the field it is waring. He is clothed in bones and skin and blood, no longer of ichor or anything godly, anything that might once have been good. The battle ends as every human kneels, body breaking itself to The Blade’s subtle command.

And the land hears peace.

\---

The Angels, long ago, became cruel.

Long before the final one became what it was, long before The Blood was birthed, long before even the God of old, the one dead for many, many centuries, now, had been powerful. 

They became twisted and hopeless, and selfish. They grew bodies that rotted, mockeries of humanity, pink and animalistic and with skin that stunk, falling off of them as they flew, shrieking their unholy sobs, ones once of anger, turned to ones of hate. 

The Angels fell to a land so far from Heaven it _burned,_ and they learned of mortality. 

The final Angel had watched from its God’s side, heralding praise for his skill, for the way he had risen, great and powerful, to cast away that which rotted and putrefied and stunk.

The Blade had been formed in God’s great image, yet he had begun to look almost as if he had fallen already. And then he had killed that who created him, and all of the Heavens had taken their dive to the ground, all that is good burning up into the atmosphere. 

But he who had fallen and it who had witnessed have grown, somehow, to walk together. Their legs --- and they truly are legs now, wrapped in bandages and skin and striding across land, only pausing should something catching their eyes, so few, now -- move in tandem, as if the two have always been meant to be this way. As if The Blood was always meant to rain and The Angels were always meant to fall.

They fall again.

\---

The Angel sinks through creation, something unholy and rattling coming from its unformed lungs as it is dragged beneath the growing world, legs flailing, feathers, so coveted by mankind, torn and bloodied with ichor.

The new God screams, something almost a name, almost a demand, as it is left in silence.

\---

There are rumors. They call her _End,_ she who assures that the God Killer, The Blade, and The Blood, and the new God, and the one who was to destroy it all, will die under her claw.

She is winged, in the same way that The Angel is. Though her wings are warped, and black, and cruel. She drags The Angel out from its own barely formed body and rips and tears and destroys. She breaks strategically, finding where eyes once had watched and rings once had protected.

But an Angel is built to fight for God.

The Angel sharpens and straightens and grows into something so deeply wrong it destroys all denizens of the world about him on sight of it. It unfurls into a body that no longer exists, blinking one, single, bulging eye, an amalgamation of everything to be seen, everything watched, since the dead God had molded it before he had molded a body himself.

The Angel came before, and it will remain at the end.

She is torn apart with a noise that shakes her domain. It does not compare to the ripping that ensues, as The Angel pulls apart the nothingness of her land and slips inside.

\---

The Angel gifts the last of its eyes to the beings of the world it has liberated. They shy from its gaze, but accept its pupils, fitting them just above their own scleras, blinking back tears of gratitude. Something breaks, when it leaves this dead world and opens a door between.

\---

 _Join the Kings,_ cry the dead things in The Blade’s mind. _Join the armies,_ they beg. _Join in with your bloodright, and kill a little more._

In the silence it is agony. He tears apart the earth in something that is beginning to find a name.

_Grief._

\---

When The Angel returns, he is new.

He has learned of beings beyond the world that his dead God had created. He has gifted many remnants of his Angelic form to those that wait there, tearing a rift through the fabric of the world and opening it up to magic never before seen. He watches, from an obsidian tower, as the beings of End leave, and humanity enters in turn, chasing a God that he has already destroyed.

He gives them gifts and power, but he does not give them the wings of the dragon. He does not let them fly.

That privilege is for The Angels alone. And The Angels, as he realizes, have died. 

But the world of End grows and populated and builds around him, and he finds himself growing restless. Rumors carry themselves inside, and he thinks, of before a century-long war, where he’d torn apart a God all of his own. The humans tell him he fought for lifetimes. He believes them, and he sheds his crown, and he weaves a mourner’s veil and black robes once again. 

\---

The Blade stands in a garden of human bodies when The Angel returns.

He is dripping in blood for the first time in centuries, but no form dares to approach as they once had, no ichor to sip from, no God-spawn to covet. He is nothing but filth and heaving breaths and humanity’s darkness. Chest wrapped in armor, legs bandaged in red. The fabric of the world, though, still sways about his ankles, the same form it had taken when he had gently pushed his fingers through it and sewn him and the final Angel clothes.

“You’ve grown different, old friend,” says The Angel, in a voice strikingly human, a weariness that had always been there given form. 

The Blade turns, chest heaving, his hands rippling with muscle. He dares the universe he rules to defy him when he opens his eyes and looks.

(He begs, he prays, he wishes the old Gods were alive to assure the return of the only equal he has ever known.)

And there is The Angel, and the war is ended.

\---

“I thought you _gone.”_

Gone, for death is what they conduct, not the symphony they are driven to. Gone, for there are few places to find oneself when you fall between universes, crowned in stars and tossed about in the syrupy insides of something far more ancient than any paltry _God._ Darker and more terrible than anything dead or alive or ever to exist or not to.

“I’m sorry,” says The Angel, to the God who killed his creator, the two of them embracing, a thing more human than perhaps any action before it. “But God has fallen.”

“And we are left,” whispers The Blade, like it’s the only words they have ever spoken to each other.

(They were the first. They perhaps mean even more now.)

\---

The Blade has created and destroyed more than the old, dead God before him had ever gotten the chance, in The Angel’s absence.

He has whispered as was once his prerogative, suggesting things that had no right to be suggested to people who were already planning on suggesting them to someone else. He has made magic where magic was dead. He has woven himself new names, uttered under someone’s breath, his orignal too heavy to bare.

Even The Angel has been given more. He has killed God just the same as his partner, now, with bloody fingers and eyes that burn. Angel Of Death, with The Blood God, The Blade to guide him. 

This new world, before them, had needed stories. Morals, fables, heroes, villains.

They are written into them all, now, somehow. 

\---

“Do you have a name?” Asks a woman, with skin split, half black as tar and half red as blood. One of her eyes is descended from The Angel’s, and he smiles at her graciously, as they pass through a town. She is young, but old enough to know of her own land’s liberation. Old enough to know why she is able to travel to this world, instead of trapped in Her End. 

Time seems to pause.

It’s as if everything starts to slow. As if centuries passed, fighting, screaming, kicking, tearing, have become truly _centuries,_ not a mere blink of an eye, not even for a God and an Angel. 

It’s as if, somewhere in the two being’s chests, they start to find humanity.

“Philza,” he says, weighing the word in his mouth. It feels earthy, like the topsoil he had taught the lesser Angels to spread. Something to put roots within, to trust, and to water, and to understand. With only one edge, there to cut, to bury and suffocate, to fill your lungs with. It’s a funny-sounding word, and he smiles, as he says it.

“And you?” She asks, turning to The Blade. “Even End had a name before she became God.”

The being now named Philza watches, with his eyes, ichor-golden, narrowed in scrutiny. The new God screws his inhuman snout up into a scowl at the combined force of their gazes. It’s a very human expression, though, and he lets out a sigh when he does.

“Technoblade,” he says, as if the name has been his all along.

\---

“We’ve walked for only _you_ know how long,” Philza says to him, one early morning, with his wings shrouded by the long veil across his face. It has lengthened in his time between worlds, drifting down to entirely shroud his face, to sit just across his feathers, sway by his ankles.

Technoblade, a true God, now, not quite _new_ any longer, nods. He is not ancient either, remind the corpses within him. He is not ancient, not like He who came before. But he takes this with triumph. “Would take an awful lot of counting to figure it out, though, hm?”

Philza doesn’t stop walking. But his eyes scan a mountain, far in the distance, with hunger. “It would.”

\---

They scale the mountain. It takes, with their human forms, their wings and hooves and snouts and eyes, far longer than it once would have. It takes planting thick spikes into heavy snow, letting weaponized ice attempt to batter you down the mountains you helped raise. It takes white, clouding your sense, blinding you further, clogging your skin and your fur and your hair, getting into your every belonging.

But they reach the highest peak, where they must shut their lungs down if they don’t want to risk their human forms falling apart. The clouds bow beneath the pair for the first time in centuries, as if they still recognize the last two living beings that had once lived within them. They still hold the ichor of Gods, and they recognize that which flows within Technoblade, within Philza. Between the two of them, they have enough power to sustain every cloud they have ever contributed to for far longer than any God could conceive.

But they sit there, in the snow, and they watch as the stars blink into focus, one by one, instead. 

The next day, Philza realizes what had drawn him to this place. He finds a cave, sunken in rock, that stinks of _rot._

Stinks of fallen Angels, and the flesh of a dead, rotting God, and the empty, terrible place between worlds, where one might live for eons and not feel a moment.

It is a cursed place, he decides, when he finds that someone has already placed four of his eyes in the frames of the door. Lava bubbles beneath the empty piece, the Endstone and gold mingling together in construction that he had once aided. 

This is not the portal that humanity finds its way to when they enter the place of End. This is not the way in.

This is the place where ichor lies, and bones sit, and flesh boils and bubbles and flays and burns.

(Neither he nor God can destroy it. They try, for three days and three nights, to do anything at all that might keep it from opening. They fail.)

But Philza is an Angel, and Technoblade is a God. They are as endless as it gets, and they persevere, spending three days and three nights more at the highest point of the mountain. They wrap wings and cloaks and creation about each other, warming the ache in their growing bones as a plan forms.

\---

“We’re not really very efficient higher beings, are we?” Asks Techno, as they hike down the mountain, plans rolled between their arms, ready to enter the town several miles south and below them. Philza looks as if he considers it beneath his veil, head cocking to the side, eyes shut.

“Eh. Not anymore, I suppose. Not if we can’t even build a bloody stronghold by ourselves.”

“Creation just doesn’t feel like it used to,” Techno sighs, dramatic and quiet. But there is truth to his words, and they both feel it. “I never was a very good God, was I?”

They stand there, and the wind howls, answering him with its ire. Snow blasts against their backs.

“God has fallen,” Philza says finally, nodding once, at what had become an old joke. Words that once weighed as heavy as thousands of shifting eyes, as ichor, as gold, and an introduction to fire, now feel like home. “And we are left.”

“Never said a _new_ God is left, did I?”

“No,” sighs Philza, running a sharp-fingered hand over his neck, tapping at the dip of his chin. “You didn’t. But we aren’t quite as divine anymore, are we.”

It’s not a question. It’s a statement, for the world to hear. It’s a concession.

They continue downward.

\---

It starts with a tent.

It happens slowly and starts with a tent. It starts as they begin to live, high up in the mountain, guarding the portal against those far below on the ground. They live days like they had millennia ago when the world was new and they went by no names other than those who gave fire, and those who created song. They are quiet, and watchful, and they plan things where they lie.

And it starts with a tent.

Just one, burlap tent, all the way down at the foot of the mountain, with only two inhabitants. Philza walks from the cave mouth one morning to see that a man has exited his encampment, a small, thickly dressed child held in his arms. He holds it up -- and for one, horrible moment, Philza thinks he might try to kill it, to sacrifice it, as the people of old had often done, trying to honor a God and an Angel the only way they could -- but then spins it in a circle, and dances around.

It starts with a tent. Then another, and another, until people start to chop down trees, and time starts to slow again. Days begin to feel more as if they pass regularly, Technoblade and Philza both watching impassively from high into the mountain as small buildings are erected, small fires burnt. They start to hunt through the forests as well, and soon, the smell of rum and roasted animals can swirl even up into the sky, as close to the Heavens that the Angel and the God above will ever be again. 

\---

 _Dead Heavens,_ remind the voices, to a God who has killed them. _You felled the Heavens._

Techno congratulates them on their perceptiveness and starts planning a trip down the cliffside.

\---

The first time either of them visits the town, there are rumors.

Rumors of men and women and otherwise that have found themselves called toward this land, only to find that the song pauses the moment they arrive. Rumors of people who have been called upon by someone whose corpse lies slumbering, as if her eyes still move, as if her wings still beat. 

They whisper of how they had come here to free a God, and they had stayed when they realized they had been blessed by another.

Philza isn’t sure when his and Technoblade’s dynamic swapped, to these people, building houses and lives. But they look up into the cave, at the very top of the mountain, with awe, and with adoration. He is so very used to terror, and to fear, and to the acceptance of death. Perhaps, of the begging for it. 

But these people speak of a winged God, from when the world was new. Who fell from the Heavens and threw the new God above down with him, beating him in a battle of wills and then killing every God to come after. Killing the End, and protecting those who hear her summons.

The townspeople do not see them and stand in silence. They see Phil’s veiled face, laced in black and void and nothingness, over robes the same shade of empty space. They see the wings on his back, draped across his companion. They see Technoblade, ichor-gold filigree on the blood-damp edges of his cloak, a wild boar’s snarl to his face, to the chipped edges of his tusks.

Technoblade nearly tears through the person who approaches them first. He looks, though, and sees a child, with pale white skin and eyes rubbed red with the cold. They hold out a flower.

It’s a soft, sky blue rose, encased in ice. Every petal is as gentle as a breath. As gentle as creation, as Technoblade takes it into his hands, ignoring the murmurs of those around him. The child -- the first, from that one tent, in the beginning -- beams.

\---

(Legend says that when The God of Blood came down from the mountain first, he accepted a flower. The color of its petals turned the bright red of his cloak a cloudless, sky, blue, more beautiful than anything the universe had ever birthed.)

\---

It starts with a tent.

And, very slowly, with construction that might have once only needed a flick of a hand, a castle comes up in its place.

The tents at the foot of the mountain are replaced by homes. The forests surrounding them are slowly cleaved through, and towns erupt, as more and more people come to marvel at the mountain, to learn of the siren call that had once come from within, now quieted by those who lived atop it. 

Philza and Technoblade don’t even know of the building until it is completed. Until, one day, they step from their musings, and find that they are faced with gold.

It can never be Heaven. It can never be sprawling ivory hands, and warmth and light and goodness and love.

It is thick stone, and marble and metal, gold so beautiful and bright one might mistake it for the rings of an Angel’s crown. It gleams with beauty and effort, painstakingly carved depictions of a veiled, winged figure, and the imposing lord that stands beside him. 

Technoblade and Philza step outside of their cave, one day. The final Angel and a God, not so new any longer, find that they are now Kings.

\---

Once, when The Blade had been only newly formed -- disfigured and awful and dripping with some human concept that might have been violence, eons later, after years of killing and walking an earth that hadn’t quite been made to accommodate him -- he was meant to be God. He was meant to sing within the Heavens, aiding creation, aiding this broken world in becoming something perfect again.

He’d learn how to sharpen in the something -- not quite time, yet, -- that passed. And then he had struck.

But his days of being King have passed. His days of heading armies that hadn’t even known he was there, waiting for an Angel, stuck in another world, to return. Days where he leaked ichor and terrible things, flesh sloughing to the ground and sparking into nothingness.

So he passes his crown -- a thing that makes something deep in his chest _ache,_ a thing that reminds him of endless eyes and shifting wings and infinite rings of gold -- onto Philza, and knights himself just before.

\---

(Legend says that when our King first addressed his citizens without his veil, it was like he had eyes for every single person in the crowd beneath him. His knight, faithful, strong, the blade at his right hand, had seemed just as inhuman and wonderful, in that moment, where we finally had someone to protect.)

\---

“You remember when you first made your outfit, hm?” Asks Phil, one night in the simple bedroom he has fashioned himself within the castle. Technoblade and he sit in silence, reading books centuries-old that they might have even been mentioned in. The Blood and The Angel have been forgotten. God and his fallen ones have faded into legend. A King and his army remain, but they are just as strong, and they do not fall apart at the touch.

He nods. “Why, don’t like the look, heh?”

Philza laughs, then sets his book down, and lifts the black lace of creation off of his face, letting it drape down his face. Technoblade thinks, at times, it’s because he wishes for his eyes back. His next words make him think differently.

“Nah, of course I do, mate. I’ve stuck with it for eons, now, haven’t I?” He shakes his head. “No. I just… hm. We should match, now that we’ve apparently got a kingdom to run. Think you could fashion me a cloak?”

It hurts, almost, to take that ancient layer of lace and wrap it around his hands, tugging it back from his old friend’s head, even more ancient. Hands unused to dipping into the well of creation and between-world energy, not having done so in centuries. But it comes to him quickly once it starts. Techno pins his legs to Philza’s back where they lounge, the being reading aloud from an old tale, and sits there for well over an hour, taking as much care as he can to weave a cloak fitting for the Angel of Death.

\---

They go back into the town. People bend to their voices, to their whims, to the appearance of their leader’s face. He is white-skinned, and white-haired, with eyes as gold as dead-God’s blood, with wings as dark and stained with black as the Ended one had been. King becomes King Philza, then King Phil. His right-hand man, boar’s face and strong hooves, becomes The Blade once again. 

They spend many days and nights there, half-neglecting their duties to the doorway high up in the mountains to learn of humanity. To further develop into truly humane beings, with hands that wish for restless starlight but can never truly touch it. 

They find men and women and beings that scale the mountain upon their return, bathed in silken robes that Technoblade fashions from the snow beneath them and the salt of their sweat. And they are called war.

\---

An enterprising faction, far across the plains, the mountain only barely visible to them, watches, as Gods become armies and Angels become Kings. They watch, and a ruler, nondescript and lost to the ages, feels a siren’s pull to the doorway between worlds. 

They march, from a castle made of crumbling stone, from a kingdom no longer new, holding weapons fashioned to look like the ones the new God had dropped, back when the world had only just begun, and such things could be buried under peat and within tar and forgotten. Curved, and gold, with shimmering, purple edges, powerfully enchanted to do things such as burn and cut armies worth of enemies.

\--- 

An enterprising faction declares war on their peaceful nation. 

They’ve only just begun to be more than King and citizens. They've only just begun to work, to become, to be more than two and more than one. They are clothed in the light blue of roses and weaponized by sharpened daggers frozen with ice and dangerous, evil things, shared with their edges by a God who has seen all that there is to know of cruelty. 

The war is begun on a sunny field, not miles from their unnamed kingdom, with a boar heading the front lines. He is clothed in creation, in the bones and bodies to come before him, that who speaks within him. Ivory white is his anger, and ichor gold is his hate.

The war does not last long.

Their kingdom expands.

\---

They retrieve the losing side and expand within it, building many more towns, many more bridges between lakes and caverns and cliffs that had previously split the kingdom from their ruler and the kingdom from the world.

Once, Philza and Technoblade had destroyed the Heavens. Then they had been tasked with preserving the only God’s corpse left, whispering her promises to people who would ask for their wings, their power, their crowns, and would find themselves cut down for their insolence. 

Now, they welcome humanity at their feet. In their halls. In their _home._ They knight warriors and build cities and breed ambassadors, using hands silken with the last shadows of creation to carve out space in the world for themselves.

Once, the only hollow the world that had allowed them in her pity was a trail, which they learned to walk upon, learned to stop and to fall and to scream and to weep and to grieve. They had been legends, dripping resource, dripping death. Now, those legends are dead.

A God, not new any longer, stands with an Angel at his side, no longer the only one left in a world where Angels do not exist. They are unholy in nature, and they become human as well.

\---

Once, when the land was a babe, still recovering from the great, baleful howls that had ruined the Heavens, from the war that had scorched her lands, turning it to ash and sand and dust and floods, two had walked.

They had walked like men from a battlefield -- which, then, they had been, leaving a war long forgotten, centuries ago. One had dripped eyes, inhuman and large and blinking back tears of golden blood. He had shed feathers and infinite metal, shifting down his forming waist and falling as he stepped out of his Angelic grace. One had dripped ichor both of his own and of one far older than he. He had shed magic and ash and dust and blade, impossible to conceive, many forms, infinite in the barest sense of the world, with the ability to crush creation with its underside.

These blades had been many, once, abandoned by their owner. They had destroyed nations. They had killed human Gods in the making. They had boiled the seas and sent storms of locusts and armies of bones. 

\---

They are in the first town when it happens.

Technoblade sits in the back of a pub, sipping lazily from a cup filled with mead and only spiked with the faintest hints of ichor. He is not bothered, here, with his cloak on, covering the inhumanity of his face, what might have sent people to the grave if they’d gazed upon it, when he was new. When the world was young, and he was a story. 

Humans mill about around him, not glancing his way, save for when he calls for another pint, or when he stretches, with a body far too long, far too large to be right. They once had bowed at his feet and begged for mercy as he killed all for miles around with one fell stroke of his blade. Now, they just whisper, confused, about the dangerous-looking stranger in the back of the pub.

Philza is doing much the same, though he cannot quite hide the white of his hair, long and shining, even though the black fabric of creation on his cloak. It has been a long time since their nation was made, formed out of stone and marble and gold and one, single tent. But the citizens within still recognize their leader, with his wings deep as death and eyes shining gold as what had once surrounded him.

They don’t need to speak. They drink, instead, in companionable silence. The God and The Angel go entirely ignored, and that is how they like it.

Then:

There is a noise like an Angel’s death. Like a God’s becoming. It snaps through the air, comparable to nothing at all human, dark as death and golden as mercy, though it certainly has never felt her gentle touch.

A blade, used not since it helped to fell the Heavens, rips through the air, and settles neatly into Technoblade’s chest.

The world freezes, time once more going back to an endless thing, mere centuries passing with one blink of many shifting eyes, not yet gone in this new time. The citizens in the room watch, as a man, nondescript and hooded, falls backward from his seat, a hand falling limp before it can try to pull the blade from his chest.

The Angel does not scream. But the image he becomes, the noise he lets out instead, Golden and bloody and all _eyes,_ staring into every soul to ever exist, is far worse. 

An Angel is built to fight for God. It is crafted first in his image, then warped, a swapping of parts for eyes, cylindrical, golden wreaths of light wrapped around wings white as creation. Voices as loud as music or as quiet as earth, whispering suggestions to those in God’s shadow and screaming the herald of the man himself. Somehow through the ages, in story and legend, Angels have become merciful. Beautiful, on wings of white and human forms, gentle hands that have never and will never learn to cut. 

This is a _lie_.

The Angel of Death bursts through all of creation, and the spot where the man who threw the blade once stood becomes a hole. He is ripped in a place that no longer exists in humans, pulled wholly apart until he is nothing at all, not living, not dead, and certainly not remembered.

The citizens watch, as their King, two eyes and golden hair and skin not quite human-pale leans over, and murmurs a breath against the ichor-stained chest of the God beneath them.

 _“Wake up,”_ he whispers, in a voice more shifting than voice. _“Old friend.”_

No one dares to move in the town, and for several miles around, as the world still. As an Angel, the only one left to do so, perhaps, carries a God in arms that are more wings than arms, more ichor than skin. He brings the God high up into the snow until they disappear from the gazes of those below. 

\---

Philza has never learned how it feels to grieve for a friend. Not in the way that Technoblade had, when his only companion sunk below creation, lost to an eons-long war, one that has not been continued for eons more. But he thinks he learns, as something hot and wet as ichor touches his face, though clear as a stream, darkening the spots of Technoblade’s cloak that have not yet stained golden.

The kingdom learns to grieve alongside him, as they learn of their faithful Blade’s peril, of the wound in his chest that has yet to stop bleeding, two weeks after the atrocity is committed.

“I won’t let them do to you what you did to him,” Philza says, though, mind made up, with a voice choked with rustling feathers and something akin to a wail. “You will live.”

And so he lies his friend down on his own bed, lighting a fire in the grate and warming his hollow bones. Technoblade looks endlessly small, with eyes sprouting ichor, face more relaxed than it has ever been. His lips and snouts leak a mixture of gold and red, the same as his cloak had once been, in mourning, before roses and ice and protection.

The blade siphons, dissolves, dilutes, into creation. It leaves Philza weak, weaving the creation he had once so effortlessly wielded. But he does it for the only being he has ever truly seen, from blind eyes, and with hands sharp as a knife. He feels the knife fall deep into the Mother, and then deeper still, to a place where even he will not venture. 

And the old God, old, now, in a time where even the world has begun to feel weary, awakens. 

He is ichor stained and weakened, with eyes shining with fever, with fear that has not yet been made known to him. That same terror is shared in the Angel, the two of them waiting, watching, for a fate they dread to come.

But Death does not visit her Angel. And the old God lives.

\---

“You were scared?”

Philza scoffs, pushing his companion’s shoulder to the side. “Ah- mate, you were too.”

Technoblade just snorts, from his spot sitting on the stairs below the throne, leaning up against Phil’s legs. “Was not.”

“You looked-”

“Technoblade never dies,” says the man below the throne, because to say that God never dies would be folly, but what is a blade without his surety?

\---

Both men and God and Godspawn have known fear. Have known grief. Have known pain.

\---

Philza and Technoblade become well acquainted with her cruel draw in the centuries passed when humans become close, and then are ripped from them in what feels like seconds. They protect and guard and war and save, but it is not always enough.

The Angel of Death, the old God, in a land which has begun to know them by many thousands of names, learn how it feels to lose, all over again. But their kingdom continues, and they rule in a gentle manner, in a way that the first God never could have understood.

\---

The people of the world know not what brings them to the mountain, any longer. They think it a sense of safety, of comradery within their kingdom. But the eldest storytellers in a village might remind you, if you pay them their wares, that there was once one beyond their rulers. An End, and one who never quite left.

The origin of their kingdom, named The Antarctic Empire by all those who have flocked to it through the years, has been lost, recorded only in sacred texts, hidden texts, word of mouth. Those who remain to remember only a rose, and a child, and a century passed with rulers that never age, but never lose a war or judge unfairly, either.

Their King wields Justice, and their Blade wields Death.

\---

The world no longer remembers her End or her call. It no longer rings out as it had when the world was not yet old, not yet new, when their kingdom was but a mountain and a tent. 

But there are whispers.

\---

Whispers of wings. Of great, beautiful, wings, adorned with gold and silk and ivory, hard as bone but light as dust. 

\---

Whispers of eyes. Of eyes, rippling with blindness, but beautiful all the same, completing a portal that leads to riches, endless and beautiful and rewarding and merciful.

\---

There had once been a time when something forgot, evil, cruel, awful, had dripped the blood of some other forgotten being onto the dirt, throwing its many weapons down to the ground as they left a battle that raged for centuries. 

The legends -- and they are only legends, no truth to be found in a world without Gods or Angels or heroes or villains -- span back before time was fully-fledged, passed down by word, by hand, by memory, by weapons. 

And, though the one weapon of the God’s is thought to remain sunken deep into the core of creation by the hands of an Angel, more powerful still than any human despite the years, it is not the final blade.

\---

God was good. God was merciful. God had great hands bound in gold, gloves as soft as silver and hard as ivory, molding the world into a new thing, a solid thing, a beautiful thing. He had hands built solely of silk, and a touch to match.

Only a weapon capable of the same thing could have felled him. God-killer, with a silken touch, with ichor still dripping from its blade, is held in the hands of a mortal, and the world seems to tilt beneath his weight.

\---

It’s as if the world herself means to warn her Angel, her God, as the curved axe-blade comes crawling up from the ground, given to someone whose ears have been drowned in madness, seeped in visions of a land once called End. 

But she does not warn fast enough.

\---

The wings, solid, massive, black and endless, cloaked and veiled in creation older than anything left upon the earth, fall to the ground in one, smooth, heap. 

An Angel stops flying as it is cut through, and it falls, with a noise like the death of a God, for only he and one other could mimic the sound.

\---

Philza is found in an ended battle, with a body hunched, unbalanced, broken. His citizens are the ones to drag him home, defeated and empty. 

His Blade does not grieve, as he looks into the eyes of _His Angel,_ and sees that they have dulled to an ocean blue. His back has shed its cloak, favoring instead bandages, wound tightly among thick stumps of skin and bone, where great, beautiful wings, to use to protect with and care with and save with and fly with, have been ripped away.

\---

A dead God, not old, not new, awakens, wearing a second set of leathery wings, stolen from the one to have killed her first.

\---

The first fight had taken a century. She had fallen under the wings she now wears, its face triumphant, leering, as it destroyed her, ripping her apart with jagged, scrambling hands. 

\---

The second fight takes a week.

\---

God kills someone who presumed herself strong enough to stand in his place and returns to his Angel with two pairs of wings.

He finds his ancient friend with a face pale flushed with fever, human and awful, no more of grace than any common citizen. He slumps in his throne, breathing heavy, as it falls from a chest limp without the weight of its wings. 

The Angel is dying, such as his creator before him, with trails of red and ichor down his back, ruining his clothes. The Angel is dying, and the kingdom will with him.

\---

But God wraps many feathers and gallons of black, starlight blood about the back of his Angel. He spins moonlight into his wounds, with hands that ache with creation, golden and old. The kingdom does not see, as he presses deft fingers into the jagged pits in and Angel’s back, and there away come wings.

\---

(Legend says that the King once had great, endless wings. He shielded us from the sun and the cold of the mountain with his feathers, and he ruled fairly. Those wings were stolen by a man. A simple man, of a long-forgotten country, and his vengeful God, she who whispered and called upon him to resurrect her. The King’s Blade plunged through her heart and left her nothing more than memory, cleaving both pairs of wings from her back. She had greedily sought the wings of her original killer. The killer’s partner tore her apart mercilessly, and returned the King’s wings to his back.)

\---

“Sorry about that one, mate,” says Philza, many more centuries passed since his wings were gone, since they were returned. “If I knew…”

Technoblade looks down at the story he’s reading, a laugh at his lips, a wry smile in his eyes. It now reads that the King held the blade himself, and retrieved his wings on his own. But Technoblade just shakes his head, a great, rumbling laugh erupting from his chest.

“We’ll both be forgotten, someday,” he says, shrugging it off. “We’ve already been before.”

\---

They leave their kingdom behind.

\--- 

It started with a tent, now long forgotten. It started with a rose, the only memory left from the beginning. It started with a siren call, silent since God went up into the End of all things and silenced it. 

But The Angel and The Blood once walked the earth, awful beings that humanity has scrambled to forget. They leave behind their castle to rulers who will be seen as all they have ever had very soon, humanity quick to forget what isn’t permanent. They leave behind their home, the portal, now buried within the mountain, and they begin to wander.

\---

“This feels familiar,” says The Blood through his teeth, on the first night, standing on legs that seem just a bit too long to be right any longer, made for their journey once again. “Heh?”

“Oh, absolutely,” says The Angel, flexing the many wings behind him, letting out an introspective hum. “Let's go see how much of the world is left.”

\---

Actually, it isn’t much. If so much hadn’t changed, it would’ve been slightly underwhelming. But as it is, kingdoms have grown, have fallen, have changed names and hands and Kings and Queens. The name of their Arctic Empire has spread far and wide, then been forgotten, then raised again, as they grow and continue to build upon themselves without their original King to guide them.

Technoblade and Philza find themselves intrigued with what they have missed in their years of royalty, many advancements in the world, rewritings of history. 

They walk endlessly, but they _do_ pause, to view villages and countries alike. They enter libraries and laugh about the misinformation. They tell secrets behind rowdy inns, spreading rumors of themselves and the past and everything they have ever done. 

Gone are the times where they leave trails of ichor and gold. Instead, they leave trails of stories. Of weaponized words, spinning history and mischief in a way that neither of them has done since the world was very young, and them among it. 

But the world is not young now. It has not been whole for eons, time stretched as far as the blind eyes of an Angel might have once been able to see. It is split into servers and kingdoms and factions and countries, new rulers under names such as King and Queen, emperor and empress, admin and owner. These are new terms, just beginning as the centuries pass, but they build history for themselves. 

Old magic spins circles around them, and they begin to recognize bits of themselves in humanity. Enchantment reserved for Gods, swirling menacingly in their weapons, cutting through the dead and the beasts that seak to maim them. Armor carved from the corpses of fallen Angels, coming from the beneath-land they’d been banished to, a deep, purple-grey. Golden magic whispering about the borders of new lands, keeping the people sealed inside. Magic, long forbidden by a God who had been vanquished in a land that was new, teaching the humans of the land how to live past death, how to cheat their rulers.

It’s _magnificent._

Philza and Technoblade learn quickly how to adapt to this new world. How to become more human, more like those that they walk through and upon. There is no space left for Gods and Angels, dead or otherwise, in this ancient world.

But there will always be whispers.

\---

Something hard, a blur of movement, barrels into Philza’s back, shoving him down onto the muddy path he treads, swallowing a mouthful of dirt, halfway through his next word. It falls as well, landing on top of him, forcing an _oof_ out from his mud-stained lips where they lie, pressed up against the ground. Technoblade, above him, snarls, and there is a sound like a blade being unsheathed.

But the heavy weight, fallen across his wings, lifts a moment later. It scrambles for purchase in the slippery mud, and bare feet appear in front of him, pale skin cracked to brown with dirt. 

“I’m- oh Ender, sorry,” says a voice, young and high with the beginning of puberty. A boy, far too young to be barefoot and alone in the middle of a village. He bends over and brown hair appears in Phil’s vision as he starts to crawl off the ground, a hand coming down to help him.

He takes the hand, though the child is not nearly strong enough to actually help. He lies a gentle hand on his companion’s sword-arm, quelling his rage with a pointed look. _This is a child,_ he seems to say, with a roll of his eyes. _Stop trying to kill kids._

When Philza looks down -- and he does need to look down, the child is _short,_ not that he’s been tall, not for a long time, since he became mostly human -- the boy looks up. He wears a floppy mop of brown hair, a face caked in mud, and something that looks a bit like blood. He’s dressed in a ragged undershirt and burlap trousers, torn at the end.

And his chest thrums with a destiny. One that Philza immediately sees, with his blind eyes, dozens buzzing in silence, fascinated by the amount of life inside of this child.

“What’s your name?” He asks, before he can stop his interest from peaking. The child looks up, surprised at the question. His eyes are too wide for his face, thin with malnutrition, thickened by the deep layers of mud and dirt upon it.

“I haven’t one,” he says, before ducking his head, ashamed of his answer. Small hands come up and fist in his shirt. 

Technoblade looks at Philza with a weary look, snout twitching in irritance as he sees a plan form in The Angel’s eyes. They know each other so intimately it takes only a shift of the pupil to understand a thousand thoughts, the endless emotions of their bodies. And Technoblade, within his friend, sees _intrigue._

“Well,” he replies once the look is shared, glancing back down at the boy. “My name is _Philza.”_

\---

Philza was never made to be kind.

He was made to be a fighter. A general to armies of winged, watching things, high above the skies and the Mother below it. He was made to help hang the stars and the Heavens in tandem, to sway in a dance that would sew the earth together and set oceans in their place. There was once a violent power to him, no more mercy than ancient Gods had been.

It is not benevolence that leads him to pick the child up off the ground, carrying him through and out of the village. It is not kindness that leads him to dip his long, pointed, sharpened fingers into an ocean of creation, sewing starlight together to fashion the child a long, warm coat. 

“Wilbur,” suggests Technoblade, sitting in front of a fire, their endless travel paused, to allow the boy to sleep. He is shielded from the cold by Philza’s winds, warm and open in the starry night. Cities have begun to pollute the skies with their energy, but Philza remembers every inch of them, and he sees them now, far away enough from any country to be free. 

“Ay, that’s conceited,” Philza tells him, shrugging his shoulders in a silent laugh. He remembers days past when _Wildbor_ was The Blade’s favorite name, the name which would turn to Wilbur, centuries later. Technoblade bristles. “I just _mean:_ don’t you think Soot matches better?”

They look down at the boy on the ground. He’s swamped beneath the feathers, but his destiny is bright, unbearably so, in his chest. The two of them are divine beings and have seen Kings rise and kingdoms fall, Godlike and otherwise. They have seen destinies as strong as this and stronger. But covered in a layer of mud, the light is quieted. Technoblade laughs.

“Wilbur Soot,” he says, firmly, and the name is right. The universe accepts it with the hunger with which it takes all names. The boy, beneath feathers, shifts in his sleep, as it settles onto him. “Wilbur Soot.”

\---

They travel the world at a pace slower than they have in eons, since the beginning, since the two of them were whole and unfractured and war hadn’t birthed their scars up outright. Wilbur walks alongside them with his childish light, drinking in all that he can see with eyes far too big for him. They settle for days, weeks, even, in villages and servers and countries that they’ve never seen before and never would’ve been interested in before. 

Philza was the one born to be cold, and calloused. Technoblade was the one born to be as merciful as the God before them. Somewhere along their journey, it seems their roles have swapped.

Philza is kind to the child. He carries him willingly, lets him run his hands -- getting larger now that he has food in his belly -- through his wings, over the cape of creation across his back. What had once been a veil and turned to a cloak becomes a blanket, for this child, destined to do _magnificent_ things. 

Technoblade is accepting of the child. He is not lenient, in the way that Philza is. But there are cold nights in the wilderness where the world seems too large for a child with such a destiny. And on these nights, the light blue of his ancient cloak, nearly as old as this world, starts to turn blood red, ichor gold, once again, as he wraps it about the boy’s shivering form.

They teach him to fight. Technoblade shows him forms that have been lost since long before the boy was even known by the _stars,_ meant for awful, long-dead weapons and purposes. Philza shows him what it means to strike in silence, using every eye to his advantage and pressing just far enough, destroying a person with not a single care.

They teach him to love. Wilbur takes to the guitar sometime after he turns eight -- though he has no need for age nor the concept of it, not when he walks among Gods and Angels. His destiny _screams_ to the tune of it, angling in such a way that his words could cut, become weapons, if he had been any less human. 

They teach him his name, and he becomes.

\---

“Hey dad?”

Philza jolts, knees rooted to the ground as he makes to sit. Wilbur, sleeping in a bed for the first time in a week, tucked beneath cloaks old as creation, yawns, and smiles. 

“Yeah, kiddo?”

(Philza was not made to create. He was made to kill and protect and watch. But this child has a destiny, and he feels that he must keep it lit.)

\---

Technoblade never becomes a father, not in the way that Phil is. He _somehow,_ despite his status as the final, ancient God of this world, becomes a glorified uncle. He huffs and he complains and he shouts, but he carries Wilbur on his high shoulders and buys him sweets, when they pass through town.

\---

Wilbur grows up.

\---

It’s something that might’ve once gone in a blink of an eye. Philza and Technoblade might not have noticed him, his density, his light, by the time he was dead, his fire fulfilled and snuffed. But as it is, they travel with him and he becomes _more._ His hands thing out and lengthen, his eyes become sharp, his destiny grows.

And along the way, lines, connecting to people far away, become clearer and clearer.

\---

They find the tiny boy rooting through their chest in the inn they’re staying in, in a server where death is permanent and stealing gets you that punishment. He is scrawny and thin and shivering. Small, golden tendrils of destiny flow from him.

Wilbur sees them too, now, with eyes that Philza, for all his Angelic blindness, have taught to see beyond. His face is sharp and scrutinizing as he faces the child, with its unruly mop of yellow hair, all the same as he had been years ago. 

_“What will you do?”_ Technoblade mutters beneath his breath, watching the one he had named step further into the room. He has no wings, a guitar strapped to his back instead. He has no tusks, but his teeth and thick and strong, and they know how to rip. He is every bit of his guardians and more.

He leans over, extending a hand. The new boy takes it.

\---

“Tommy,” suggests Philza’s son, with a shrug and a laugh. “It’s a dumb name. I- I rather think he deserves it, though.”

“Well, yes,” sighs the Angel, his wings draped protectively behind his companion, his son, and the new child. This new being has a destiny even brighter than Wilbur, so startling and silver that it makes his chest ache. Technoblade can sense it all, and he looks with divine eyes, seeing that the shade is the same as the rings that had once surrounded his companion, as the ichor that had once fled from his own form. 

They turn to Technoblade, as he lets out a soft, interested noise. He leans over and traces a claw across the sleeping boy’s temple, eyes softly intrigued. 

“I think, Phil,” he begins, with a voice soft as an earthquake. “We should settle here.”

\---

The land is all ice and snow and bitter cold. It is the same as that mountain of centuries past, with a long-dead portal, a long-dead kingdom, only part of the history books now. When they’d abandoned their land they’d foreseen this, but it hurts, seeing a world so close to the one that they had left behind.

Tommy is an energetic child. Even louder than Wilbur had been, with a mouth to match, cursing God and the Heavens he fell down on. Technoblade and Philza don’t explain why they laugh so much at this, but even Wilbur smiles as if the boy has some idea of why it might be funny.

They start their new kingdom themselves, this time. There is no tent, no cave, no whistling wind or castle. There is a small cabin, with a modern look, something the two, ancient beings are wholly unused to. Wilbur, sixteen, now, helps them build.

It’s odd, being directed by a human. Once, The Angel and The Blood had built nations, built Heavens and plains and forests alike, filling the oceans and spreading seeds across the empty dirt. But now Wilbur is the one to guide them, not unlike the God of old, disappeared from memory now. 

If Technoblade is some ancient force, some long-forgotten God, then the first one had practically not existed at all. Not a single star in the sky nor wind in the trees remembers who came before, only who killed whatever it had been. And even then, the memory is foggy, hazy with confusion.

Philza does not become any more parental towards the two children, though he protects them in a way that the dead God had never intended for him to do. He brings them shelters and light and safety.

Technoblade does not become a father, nor a brother, nor a friend. But he stands in front of these children when faced with danger, and his face goes dark as End, and he draws a blade that the Mother herself shivers and cries out at. 

The two are Guardian Angels, Guardians Gods, keepers of those destined to do great things. Terrible things.

Time moves achingly slow. They watch the children get older.

Then there is a third, destiny lines between the two of their charges as thick as creation. He is abandoned and half-dead, a limp thing, a broken thing, with pieces split apart and mourning already in his expression the moment he awakens. He is found in a box, on the ground outside their home, covered in snow and blood.

\---

“Tubbo,” says Tommy, bursting out into laughter when Philza carries the boy inside, in a box, covered in blood. “Tubbo in a box.”

“That’s a stupid fucking name,” says Technoblade matter-of-factly. But it sticks, just as his own had, in a forgotten time when the land was still growing when a woman who was neither old nor young sought his title.

\---

Their children grow up. 

Their children leave.

Their destinies are blinding. They are golden and silver and ichor and blood. Philza wonders, if the rings and eyes he was once comprised of, had formed life.

He sees them leave, and he wonders.

\---

Whatever the first God had intended to do when he created Technoblade was cruelly warped, creating something hideous and evil and a mockery of all things good. Whatever he had intended when he’d created his first Angel had been broken, torn apart, and wrapped together with a veil made of death and life at once, all things wrong to compliment the final living God.

When Technoblade hears of his children’s destiny, he leaves Philza in their cabin. It is the first time they have separated since he left to kill the End for her final death, retrieving the wings from her back, slipping in blood. It is not a good feeling, to be apart, a God separated from an Angel, friends more than any friends have ever been, but they deem it necessary.

God had not intended for Technoblade to become war. He had not intended to create his killer, the thing destined to destroy him and every God before. 

Technoblade thinks, as he walks through the ocean and into a new land, finding that his charges and their destiny have been scorned, that he might still have something protective left inside of him.

\---

They don’t ask who he is. There have been legends, of one centuries ago, who had held his name, held his form. He knows that none of them believe he is the true one, the first God, the ruler of all. He knows they believe him to be strong, and to be able to save them, though, and so he tries his best.

\---

Wilbur Soot, _Wildbor_ and _Wild Boar_ and _child_ and _destiny,_ still shines with light so strong it burns, his destiny, always so flickering and beautiful, has only grown in his time here, creating his own world, learning from his God and his Angel both, becoming what they had become in a human form. 

His sanity has not strengthened.

\---

Technoblade helps set the bombs, and he thinks of Philza. He will destroy this awful land just as he has destroyed lands before, and then he will return with their charges, and they will walk away from this place as they have thousands of times before.

\---

The world erupts into white.

\---

Ground and flesh and stone and marble and blood and ichor, flying through the air, mingling with the noises of screaming children and war. 

Technoblade has not fought an army in centuries. He thinks, as he surveys this scorched, cracked land, less whole than he has seen it since he dripped the blood of a dead God for all of humanity to see, that it is _dead._

\---

Philza’s wings cover his son when the explosions begin. They are shredded, dripping ichor, by the time it all quiets, feathers dropping to the ground, ruined skin unable to hold itself up. The cloak on his back, woven by creation, shifts of its own accord in place of his ruined wings, pulling him forward and into the arms of his son. They embrace, and the jagged, terrible edges of his wings _burn_ as they loop around Wilbur Soot.

Hands, sharp as death and gentle as they have ever been, reach within the son’s chest, and a destiny goes quiet.

\---

Philza, when he screams, does not shake the Heavens. There is no crashing of marble nor breaking of lands nor shifting of many thousands of wings and eyes and rings, but he holds his son in his arms, destiny snapped within his golden chest. His hands are soaked in blood, red and cold. Wilbur lies there, motionless, with a smile on his face.

\---

 _This is your destiny,_ say the voices, soft and crooning and so, so awful, it makes Technoblade’s heart wrench with it all. _They have all fallen. And you are left._

He hasn’t touched creation since he destroyed the End. He has not dipped his hands between the matter of two universes, reaching into something only accessible to a God, to a thing so ancient that the thought of its birth could kill. His hands ripple through the world and find those that have fallen before him, corpses and souls consumed by ages past, trapped in a hellscape. He takes blackened skulls and the dry, sands of a dead thing.

Technoblade makes a new beast, part End and part God and part Angel and part child. He rips at the first God’s creations and builds, something so horrible and ugly it almost feels like home.

\---

The withered things, with their skulls and sandy forms, destroy the country his son had created. Phil weeps, and his chest _burns,_ and his wings are broken to pieces, just as fractured as the world around him.

\--- 

Angel and Death and Blood and Blade.

The first named beings stretch broken wings and close bright red eyes, supporting each other and their ruined limbs like they haven’t since all of creation was new. For the first time since the beginning, they leak ichor and ash and gold and eyes, as they tremble through the world, returning to a home that can never compare to what they have lost.

**Author's Note:**

> Yo, does any of this shit even makes sense? *Shrugs vaguely.* 
> 
> I appreciate every single comment and kudo and bookmark I'm given! If you're feeling up to it, reader, any interaction would be absolutely wonderful. Tell me what you think or be silently supportive, I'm open for it all!


End file.
